Food Blog Income Report – April 2019

Here is the monthly Food Blog Income Report for April 2019 – follow along with me to see how I’m growing my blog into a business!

Another month of blogging gone by. I can never believe how fast the time goes.

I just returned from the Everything Food Conference in Salt Lake City and had such a great time meeting new people and learning so many different things. If you’ve never been to a food blogging conference before, I highly recommend it.

It’s a great place to network with other bloggers and brands, as well as an awesome learning experience. I left with some amazing info to help my SEO strategy, which I am very excited to implement.

April was an interesting month traffic-wise. It was great at the beginning, but it definitely started to drop off after Easter. This is pretty normal as we head into slower summer months, but it’s still hard to look at when you’re trying to grow your blog.

Why I Started Went Here 8 This

To be candid, the reason I started my blog was to make money.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE food blogging. Creating new recipes, photographing them and getting to share them with the world is a passion of mine. I want everyone to be enjoying their food as much as I do!

That said, food blogging is HARD work, especially while working a full time job. It really only leaves me with early mornings, evenings and weekends to work on the blog.

I have always had the goal of retiring early from my day job. But in order to make that happen, I needed to start generating some income on the side, and what better way than to start my own business?

I’m here to tell you that you can do it. If I can do it, you can do it.

I’m not going to sugar coat anything in these blog income reports. I’m in the red again in February. That’s because I live by the philosophy that you have to spend money to make money.

Yes, you can start a blog for a minimal amount of money. But in my opinion, if you want to see serious growth you:

1) need to spend SOME money. Not all the money, but you will need to make some investments in your business; and

2) be willing to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. Food blogging is competitive. But there definitely is a lot of money to be made.

These income reports are going to show you how much money I really make, before and after expenses. (but before taxes)

I started Went Here 8 This in October 2016, but didn’t have a CLUE what I was doing until mid way through 2018. I have used a lot of resources to include attending blogger conferences, joining Food Blogger Pro and reading as much as I can in Facebook groups and other media to learn everything I can about making this blog a successful business.

April 2019 Blog Traffic:

April started out well, but started to decline after Easter. The decline was expected, but still hard to swallow after so many months of growth. However, if I compare it with a year ago, growth has been huge (from about 10K pageviews/month to the 70K pageviews/month currently). Can’t complain.

Traffic overview:

My total page views for April were 69,399.

My traffic for April 2019 came from the following top 5 sources:

Organic: 48%

Social: 39%

Pinterest: 81%

Facebook: 17%

Twitter: 1%

YouTube: 1%

Direct: 8%

Referral: 4%

Email/Other: 1%

One of my goals for 2019 is toimprove my link building so I am able to get more traffic from other sites, as well as look better in the eyes of Google. If you want to learn more about link building, check out this presentation given by Casey Markee.

A couple example of some articles I wrote to help with link building are below:

April 2019 Income Report

I had made small amounts on my blog for the past 6 months, but only averaging around $50/month. In December 2018, I qualified for Mediavine (an ad network) and that has become a game changer.

In April 2019, my blog income and expenses were as follows:

On page advertising (Mediavine): $933.70, with an average RPM of $22.23.

Amazon Affiliate Marketing: $155.86

TOTAL INCOME: $1,089.56

My total expenses for April 2019 were $782.81; (note some of the below links are affiliate links – I earn a small commission if you buy through these).

Monthly Expenses:

Hosting (Cloudways): $12.50. Good hosting is a must. If you’re on Bluehost, you’re going to want to switch now. Cloudways is a great option to make sure your site is always up, and also helps site speed, which is extremely important.

WordPress Support Plan: $113.00. I use Nerdpress to manage all the technical/security aspects of my website. Because me and tech do not get along. It’s better if we have space.

Imagify Image Compression: $4.99. If you’re not compressing your images, you need to be. This is a great plugin that doesn’t affect the quality of you images too much.

**In December, I signed up for a WordPress support plan with Andrew Wilder from Nerdpress. My site speed has increased immensely, which I fully believe results in higher traffic. If you’re not tech oriented, I highly recommend checking out one of his support plans. (I’m not an affiliate, I just love the service he provides)

Read More Income Reports:

What Am I Doing for Next Month?

In January, I had an SEO audit with Casey Markee which is the best thing I have done for my blog yet. I highly recommend his services if you want to grow your blog. You can find him over at MEDIAWYSE.

So, for the rest of the year, I will be working hard to improve the SEO on all current and older blog posts. SO. MUCH. WORK. You’ll get to see the outcome of this in the coming months income reports so make sure you check back next month to see how it’s going!

Sign up to get the weekly newsletter from Went Here 8 This – Plus a FREE Instant Pot cookbook!

Want to Make Money Blogging?

Just get started. Seriously. Dive in and learn everything you can possibly can and get that blog up and running. Hopefully this income report will inspire you to do so.

Because like I said, I knew NOTHING when I started. And if I can do it, you can do it.

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Hi there. I’m Danielle and I love food. Here you’ll find easy-to-make recipes using ingredients from cuisines all around the world. More…

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Went Here 8 This is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases.